The Mankato free press. [volume] (Mankato, Blue Earth County, Minn.) 1879-1924, 1887-01-21
FOR THE LADIES.
Present Phases of the Woman Problem.
How Can They be Provided With
Work.
Books I'm Bedrooms For the Entertain.
ment OF Guests-Household Hints
and Fancies.
PRESENT PHASES OF THE WOMAN PROB
LEM.

PRESENT PHASES OF III WOMAN PROB
LEM.
Of late years this question of woman's
work has passed into another phase,
and the crux now is, not so much how
they car be provided with work ade-
quately remunerated. but how they can
tit themselves for doing it without dam
age TO their health and those interests
Of the race and society which are bound
up with their well-being. This is the
difficulty, both of the higher education
and of the general circumstances sur
rounding the ~self-support of women.
For the strain is severe, and must be. if
they are TO successfully compete with
men-undeniably the stronger, both in
mind and body, in intellectual grasp
and staying power, in the faculty of
origination, the capacity for sustained
effort, and in patient perseverance un-
der arduous and it may be distasteful
labor. But the dream and the chief en-
deavor of women now is to do the same
work rs men alone have hitherto done
which means that the weaker shall
come into direct competition with the
stronger-the result being surely a fore
gone conclusion. This is the natural
consequence of the degradation by wo-
men themselves of their own more fit
ting work; so that q female doctor, for
the present, holds a higher social posi-
ton than does the resident governess,
while a telegraph-girl may be a lady,
but a shop-girl can not.
For well-paid intellectual work a
good education is naturally of the first
necessity, and the base on which all the
rest is founded. Wherefore, the higher
education has been organized more as a
practical equipment than as an out
come of the purely intellectual desire OF
women TO learn where they have moth
ing to gain by it. For all this. many
girls 90 to Girton and Newman who
do not mean to practically profit by
their education-girls who want to
escape from the narrow limits of the
home, and who yearn after the quasi
independence of college-life-girls to
whom the unknown is emphatically the
magnificent, and who desire novelty
before all things; with the remnant of
the purely studious-those who love
learning for its own sake only, indepen-
dent of gain, kudos, freedom, or novel
ty. But these are the women who
would have studied as ardently, and
with less strain, in their own homes;
who would have taken a longer time
over their education, and would not
have hurt their health and drained their
vital energies by doing in two or three
years what should have taken five or
six; who would have gathered with
more deliberation, not spurred by emu
lation nor driven by competition; and
who, with energy super-added to their
love of knowledge, would have made
the Mrs. Somervilles or Caroline Her.
schels, the Miss Burneys or Harriet Mar
tineaus, of history. But such women
are not many; voluntary devotion. ire
spective of s%elf-interest, to art, literature,
science, philosophy, being one of the
rarest accidents in the history of wo-
men-as, indeed. must needs be if they
are TO fulfill the natural functions of
their sex.-Mrs. E. Lynn Linton, in
ODnLG Science NOuthLD